A thread that kicked off with the post “Isn’t the value of a college degree about to crash in the AI era?” took off on 5ch’s Nanji board (Livejupiter, a general chat/sports board). As AI increasingly handles document creation, meeting minutes, and even medical diagnosis, opinions clashed head-on: some argued that academic credentials no longer mean anything, while others countered that the harder it becomes to see differences in ability, the more employers will lean on a degree as a “trust signal.” The thread also cited a Forbes JAPAN article describing a real case of a young graduate from a top university who sent out over 1,000 résumés amid the AI-era job crunch and still couldn’t land an offer.
Going forward, maybe only elementary school will matter.
Middle school and high school will disappear too.
Already worthless?
We're doomed 😫
Yeah, probably.
What happens to all the skyscraper districts, though?
Will they turn into ghost towns, like those shuttered shopping streets?
Look at reality.
If you actually look at reality, there's just no way degrees keep their value…
Construction workers are the winners.
Honestly, that seems pretty likely.
Once physical AI (robots) arrive, that job gets wiped out too, but construction work will probably be the last to go.
Will we go back to a fixed caste system like feudal society?
It'd be great if ranking disappeared altogether.
But humans are approval-seeking monsters, so we'll probably just find something else to fight over — "I'm better than you" arguments, just about a different thing.
No way it disappears.
Being smart is literally human worth.
Tools might get so good that human skill differences stop mattering at all.
Japanese people especially are authority-worshippers, so reverence for top-university grads will keep going.
I think degrees were worshipped because they got you into good companies, let you produce good output, and got you a good salary.
All of that is about to go away, so I think degree value is going to crash.
Opposite, actually.
People who are only good on paper — high credentials, no ability — get replaced by AI in a heartbeat.
Some low-credential guy: "Please let degrees stop mattering!!!"
As if lmaooooo
Companies won't even need new hires anymore.
In fact, in America, Harvard and Stanford grads are already in despair over the AI-driven job crunch.
No way that's true.
That's just wishful thinking lol
Guess I was just ignorant 😭
Actually, it can…
AI's already handling diagnosis as it is.
Some old-timer who's totally out of touch with the times?
And what about degrees?
You need a solid education to actually use AI well, y'know lol
I'm a liberal-arts grad from a MARCH-tier university (a group of mid-tier private universities in Japan: Meiji, Aoyama Gakuin, Rikkyo, Chuo, Hosei).
Sounds like grandpa's never even used AI.
No way that's true.
Employees with low education who'd never even touched PowerPoint before are now, as of a few months ago, churning out slide decks with the look and content quality of something outsourced to a vendor.
And new hires who don't understand a single word of the meeting still produce perfect minutes lol
I think everyone will basically become their own CEO.
People who belong to organizations = the ones AI replaces.
I think so too.
Even if it's not literally one person, I think we'll keep seeing tiny teams building companies worth trillions of yen in market cap.
There's no such thing as low-education-but-highly-capable.
Even though plenty of high-credential people are useless??
It's not that degrees lose their value — it's that the reason they have value changes.
The more AI narrows the gap in output quality, the harder it gets for employers to judge ability up front, so a trust signal like a degree is actually more likely to stick around.
This, exactly.
If everyone's submitting a polished AI-written personal statement, of course employers will just default to picking whoever has the better degree.
It's precisely because AI narrows individual differences in value and cuts down on education costs that it turns into a full-on "degree game."
A degree ends up being basically the only thing left to differentiate yourself with — and sure enough, similarly-positioned certifications have been gaining value for the same reason.
Agreed.
Once AI can help you prep your entry-sheet answers and interview responses too, the people left standing will be the ones with strong looks and degrees — the two things AI can't fake its way around.
https://forbesjapan.com/articles/detail/97544?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Last week I met a young man (let's call him David) who'd just graduated from a top university. He studied hard, earned his degree, and submitted more than 1,000 résumés. He got 14 replies, 4 first-round interviews, and made it to a second interview twice… and he's still unemployed.
If anything, the people who benefit most from AI are the ones who are only credentialed, not actually capable.
AI just shrinks the gap between capable and incapable people who both have high degrees — the social divide between high- and low-education people doesn't change.
A degree is basically a caste system at this point.
Assuming that a useless-but-credentialed person can even use AI well — that's just wishful thinking on your part lol
Good one.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
This debate over academic credentials echoes the structure of what economists call “signaling theory” (the idea that a degree functions as a proxy indicator guaranteeing a person’s ability). The counterargument that, as AI narrows the gap in individual output, employers find it harder to judge ability from interviews or essays alone and so lean more heavily on an easy-to-read indicator like a degree, lines up with this theory. On the other hand, the Forbes JAPAN article cited in the thread was actually about how AI-driven efficiency in document screening reduces the number of touchpoints with applicants in the first place, so even highly educated candidates can’t get to the interview stage — a point that’s easy to misread as “degrees becoming meaningless” when it’s really about “the entry point to the hiring process narrowing.” Some replies in the thread also drew a distinction between formal education and raw academic ability (“jiatama,” or native smarts), and opinions were split on which one actually loses its value.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nanji board) thread “Isn’t the value of a degree about to crash in the AI era? 🤔.”
